 From time to time I come across distributions that are how shall we say? Unknown to me and that shouldn't surprise anybody because there's like 5,000 different distributions out there Maybe exaggerating a little bit, but there's definitely a lot. There's no way Anybody could know all of them. So every once in a while I go to distro watch our favorite website and I take a gander through the new releases and Every once in a while I'll come across a distro that just makes me ask what is that distro? Why does this exist? What is it? I get very curious So today the distribution that caught my attention is a distribution called slacks now what slacks is is apparently a live ISO Linux distribution meaning that it's meant to be run on a USB key and it has persistent media so that you can actually run and use the USB key as if it was your your hard drive So we're not actually be installing this today at all as far as I'm aware you can't install it now I don't know if that's true or not. We're going to find out But its purpose is to be ran from a live environment. So that's what we're going to do today So first let's go ahead and take a look at the website Now usually when I do these WTF videos The website is not great. A lot of times it's just sourceforge But this is actually a very nice looking website. This looks really well put together And there's a lot of actual documentation on here. There's a lot of different Descriptions on there and there's a list of packages and there's a changelog and it's a really well put together website Now if we go up here to the start slacks We'll actually get an entire page of stuff that will tell you how Slacks is meant to be run all the way from maintaining persistent changes to the boot options that it offers and so on and so forth Now obviously if you're running this from a cd The persistence the persistent changes won't work because you're not using writeable media even if you're using like an rw That's not the way the stuff really is meant to be working But if you're using a usb flash drive you can use this as a persistent media tool And that means you don't install anything you just boot into it. Do your work? Shut it down properly, mind you and it should save all of the changes you made during that session So that's really cool, right? Something like tails or cubes or something like that, which is meant to be used anonymously Now one thing that you don't see on this all that much is actually the use of that Rationale it doesn't say hey, this is an ultra private distribution. It doesn't say anything like that I mean, I'm sure maybe it is I'm not I'm not doubting that it's meant to be private and all that stuff But it's not what it's for instead. It's supposed to be ultra light weight in terms of resources and programs So that you can carry around a full fledged Linux distribution in your pocket. That sounds cool So I could go through and read the stuff, you know on camera, but that sounds boring to me I will leave a link to the website as usual down in the video description Instead, let's go see if we can get this thing to run So let's go ahead and go over divert manager hit begin installation And we'll see if we can get this thing to go full screen and here we go And this is what slacks look like. So we had even we have a start menu now I am not actually sure what desktop environment this is or what it's based on. I have no clue So we're going to have to investigate that we're going to have to look and see what software is here And so on and so forth and as we can see there is actually no way of installing this as far as I can tell Now also this right here looks like all the programs that are installed There's what five there and three there. That's eight One of them is a terminal. So this looks like vlc and that yep. That's vlc So it's actually going to install that so it's not even installed out of the out of the box It's just there Now this is based on debi and 11. Now I should mention that this ISO that I downloaded is a release candidate. So if we see bugs, it's meant there it's meant to be buggy It's a release candidate. So I'm not going to get after it for there being bugs It's just the way it's supposed to meant to be so that was I mean it ran it. It opened it That was pretty cool. A lot of times with these Smaller distros. I expect things to kind of be half-assed That wasn't half-assed. That was really good. So that was that's vlc. I wonder if they're all kind of like that I'm assuming the terminal actually is just a terminal. This is x term. So let's do uname-a. See what kernel we're running We're running 5.10 typical debian 11 fare and then we can go through and see if neofetch is installed It is not so we can the cool thing here is we just do apt install neofetch And now we can run neofetch And we have neofetch now We don't have a custom ascii or and it doesn't actually say that this is slacks. It just says it's debian We have kernel 5.10 as we saw we have 633 packages installed Which if you've ever used debian before you'll know that that number is really low. I mean like really Really low. This is the flux box window manager That's why I didn't recognize it because this is the absolute best i've ever seen flux box look like this is an amazing looking window manager and usually flux box like the mx version of flux box is And i'm sorry mx. I love you, but your flux box themes are Really bad. They're old and they don't look good. So this is flux box with the slacks theme theme This is x term as we said so not a lot here. There's no way to install it as far as I can tell You're not meant to install it. This is just the way it is So unfortunately, I don't know how i'm going to test the persistence because i'm not using this on a usb key I'm using this in a virtual machine And the isos in a virtual machine aren't writable. Usually the writable part is the hard drive. So I'm not sure how I'd go about testing that. I'm sure there's a way This is just pure ignorance on my part So I won't be able to test the persistence part of this Which is actually kind of disappointing because I was actually kind of looking forward to that So I'll have to test that off camera and see if I can go through and Use it on a usb key, but I won't be able to show that on camera So as a browser we get what looks to be chromium and it's going to install it So one of the reasons why that package count was so low is because the stuff that it says it's actually The stuff that says it's actual here is not actually installed. What text editor do they want us to install and stuff? So this is psi te I've never heard of that before like in my entire life. So that's a that's a text editor that I've never heard of before But that's already installed and we do have chromium here installed now. I wish now I wish instead of chromium we had the option for firefox But apparently you can't even install firefox. I tried to install firefox. So sudo apt Install firefox and it just says there's no installation candidate there Probably you could go through and enable all their repositories if you wanted in order to get firefox I wonder actually if firefox esr is here Yeah, firefox esr is here. That's this it's debbie and I always forget that debbie and doesn't have the regular firefox Binary, it's just the esr mode. So now we have firefox installed And that even appears right here in the menu. So this is firefox And that it shows you that you can install stuff, you know, it's If you're running us on a usb key You'd be able to shut this down and come back and all your stuff would still be Installed as far as I'm aware. I like I said, I haven't been able to test that because I'm on a virtual machine But the idea that is really good. There's not a lot here that we can talk about because there's not a lot here This is a probably the most minimal distribution. I've literally ever tried actually what we can do here is See how much memory we're using 230 yeah using 230 megabytes of ram that's absolutely bonkers Like you're not going to get much lower than that and have an actual, you know, like window environment Now, obviously if you're just running like a tty you can get way lower than that But I'm not just running a tty. There's actual windows being drawn on the screen And I'm pretty sure xorg takes about that much Like if we do let's see if htop here is installed it is installed by default. So yeah The best majority of the memory that we're using here is going is xorg This is I thought So this is has 28 tasks 32 threads. That's just Again, that's bonkers for anything now a lot of that is flux box flux box It's always very minimal in terms of resource usage But debbing usually isn't right even if you install debbing of any flavor Some of that resource usage is that debbing or that you're seeing is always going to be at least some of the things that debbing You know uses and it obviously will balloon even farther than that if you choose some kind of Desktop environment like, you know, or katie or whatever. So the fact that you're seeing 28 tasks and 32 threads is kind of annoyingly minimal So let's just see one thing I haven't seen here is a settings panel Like do you see a settings panel here archiver? I think it's just going to be like yeah, let's get on zip stuff What if we right click on this workspace screenless resolution? So this is how you're going to change your screen resolution I will change that should be 1920 by 1080. There we go It didn't work all that great because the meant the bar went away So you can change your keyboard layout your workspaces and change between workspaces and the icons for the workspaces You can create new workspaces and you can remove the last one And then xn log out. That's literally it. That's all there is no I It's been a long time since I've used flux box I don't remember if flux box has its own settings panel or the one that I vaguely remember Was an mx tool. I'm it's probably an mx tool. I'm guessing seeing so there's literally nothing else here Now again, the resolution change kind of borked this up a little bit as you can see But that's not going to that's either going to be because again This is a release candidate or it's because this is a virtual machine So I'm not going to harp on them too bad about that. So let's go ahead and just wrap this up That is slacks now Out of all of the distributions that I've had in this series the ones that I've looked at This one is the most interesting to me because imagine if you will You wanted to always have Linux around with you and you wanted to ensure That no matter what it would run like no matter what hardware you're on You you'd always have a Linux environment That has all of your applications and whatever With you in your pocket on the size of a usb key like this What distribution you're going to choose now mx has a persistent mode, but it has to be enabled it's not enabled by default and Again as much as I love mx. It's still a full-fledged Distribution it has all the stuff that has that gives you a distribution It has a desktop environment unless you choose the flux box version, which is then a window manager So you're going to have a ton of packages a ton of overhead And when I say a ton, I mean, I'm not saying like mx is bloated or anything I'm just saying that it uses more than 200 megabytes of ram Out of the box now. I'm not sure what the flux box version of mx uses I haven't it's been almost a year since I've looked at it Probably should look at that again But I bet that it uses at least a little bit more than this does and it For sure comes with more applications installed out of the box like damn sure it does It comes with more mx tools Then slacks comes with actual programs because slacks doesn't actually come with too many programs No, we didn't look at the like the file manager if we can open this up. That's called tux commander I'd have never heard of tux commanders before. Let's go ahead and look at about this is tux commander But I would almost guarantee my friends that this is either based off of double commander Or crusader because this has the same Line of buttons along the bottom as crusader does and if this is based on crusader or even double commander They have my heart because I love crusader. It's my favorite Linux application But anyways, it has that and then we open up the terminal or the calculator That was the only other application that was installed and I'm guessing that this is genom calculator This is genom calculator. This looks like the only genom app installed as well. So literally There's not much there, right? And That's impressive to me that the ability to install whatever you want. I mean, it's a devian system So you're gonna have to deal with the fact that devian Doesn't have the largest repositories in the world and it's all going to be outdated but The idea of carrying around an entire Linux system in your pocket I'm one of these and it just being persistent all the time and it will run on whatever hardware you happen to encounter Like that's amazing. That's cool to me. So that is slacks There's not a lot here is if you want to explore more about it I will link the website in the video description There were two package lists there if you wanted to see what packages were installed And there were several boot options that you could use if you wanted to change the way it boots And those boot options will allow you to do several things like Disable the loader of certain sb modules Load with no sound just in case you're loading in a place where you don't want things to you know have sound You can activate the entire fresh copy to ram and so on and so forth. There's a few of them There's also a debug option in case you're having problems. So Usually in this in this series, I Have a hard time liking the distribution that I've chosen to look at And usually I spend about a half an hour looking at it and going through the Various things and while I record time with this is about 20 minutes I will say that I'm highly impressed with this So if you have comments about slacks or slacks or questions, you can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on twitter at the limits cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast I think i'm going to go through and install this on a usb key now and just see how it runs on a usb key I want i'm very curious about it and For that to happen in this series is a milestone of you know in and of itself So uh, that is it for this video before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank the current patrons Today devon patrick marcus maglen jackson have tool see vey cyber galenix garrick michael art center carbonated jeremy Sean odin martini Merrick camp drash li j dog peter a crucible dark band at six glad a in primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time